1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to ciphering apparatus and methods and, in particular, stream-type block cipher apparatus and methods.
2. Background Art
The Internet has become a powerful public communication and information tool. Even so, secure communication between peer computing nodes (peer-to-peer communication) has become vulnerable to attack by the nefarious and by privacy-loathing governments around the world. Secure peer-to-peer communications on the Internet enhances the networks' utility as a means of commerce. However, a wide-used form of security—Public Key Encryption, including RSA—is vulnerable to mathematical attacks. Another form, DES is no longer considered to provide enough security for secure transactions. Yet another, RC4, is expensive in that it requires a large amount of memory and setup time. Almost all current ciphers require manual human intervention to work; it is highly desirable to have well-distributed random number generators to provide for secure keys, and humans are notoriously bad at generating lengthy random numbers and at recalling, long, truly random passwords. Ciphering apparatus and methods avoiding these shortcomings are desirable.